Empty Hands Music
While elections work differently depending on where you live, all states have security measures to ensure the integrity of every vote. With that in mind, The Fulcrum presents a six-part series on how elections work in swing states. Created by Issue One, these state summaries focus on each state's election process from registration to certification.
Our freedom to vote in fair and secure elections is the foundation of our system of self- governance established under the U.S. Constitution. As citizens, we have a voice that many people around the world do not.
Because the majority of elections are run at a local level, the voting experience can be very different depending on where a voter lives, but all states, including Michigan, have verification processes in place before, during, and after votes are cast to ensure the integrity of the election. Whether you cast your ballot in-person or by mail, early or on Election Day, your vote counts.
Here is what you need to know about how elections work in Michigan to make sure that your vote is kept safe and secure and is counted with integrity.
To ensure their eligibility, all voters must register to vote in order to cast a ballot.
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Once registered, a voter in Michigan may either vote in-person or through an absentee ballot. Both options have transparent processes to ensure ballots are kept secure and counted accurately.
Vote with a mail-in or absentee ballot:
Vote early in-person:
Vote in-person on Election Day:
There are also options for military and overseas voting, more information is available here: https://www.michigan. gov/sos/elections/voting/military-and-overseas-voters
Track your ballot: https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/Voter/Index
Before, during, and after ballots are cast, Michigan has procedures to review and verify election processes. Voting equipment testing, ballot counting, post-election audits and recounts are open to the public.
members of the public. Voters with disabilities may use a different type of machine to help them mark their ballot. These machines must produce a “voter verifiable paper audit trail.”
For more information on how elections work in Michigan, visit the Department of State: Michigan.gov/Vote.
For additional national and other state-by-state information, go to https://www.howelectionswork.org/.
Hsu focuses on awareness through music in her Conscious Listening classes and residencies. Hsu is also a public voices fellow with The Op Ed Project.
This presidential election is one of the most high stakes and divisive races any of us have experienced. As we wait anxiously to see how swing state voters will decide the election for the rest of us, many feel powerless and irrelevant.
The frightening reality is that we have reached a tipping point where distrust and disconnection have become normalized. We no longer seem to have common values or the civility to disagree respectfully. And when we lose the ability to connect, reason disappears. We urgently need to reclaim the power to connect with ourselves and with others.
As a Juilliard-trained pianist and educator specializing in listening skills, as an immigrant working with partners and clients from multiple cultures, and as an arts entrepreneur seeking innovative opportunities to engage, I believe it is not too late to weave a stronger cultural fabric — if we all participate.
My work in music is often misunderstood to be the work of playing notes quickly and accurately. However, it is not the individual notes but the moment-to-moment listening and consequent decisions that create the spirit of the piece.
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Most of my time is spent listening for what is missing. Building connections between the different elements, imagining how the harmony and the dynamic contour can better support each other, teasing out what is primary and what is secondary information, creating a tensegrity of multidimensional layers.
Whatever happens in November, after the election we will still have another war to fight. And that will be between our own cynicism — the curse we have created for ourselves — and a conscious decision to disarm and reconnect tense relationships. When the opposition goads us, it is hard to stay dignified and not retaliate. But creating unity and reconciliation demands we give up something.
When we listen to the opposition, we are not condoning irresponsible behavior, forfeiting our right to speak our own perspective or throwing blame around. We are doing our part to engage and create the opportunity for a pathway forward.
While we can’t change the minds of those entrenched in xenophobia or personal wealth or conspiracy theories, we can creatively improve the cultural conditions that prime our brains to connect with each other. If we each level up our listening strategies, our collective impact adds up over time. Here are four tactics I use as a teacher, to foster engagement.
1. Notice and applaud the courage to take emotional risks. Human beings, like live music, require a willing audience in order to reveal their inner being. Many people who might normally withdraw to avoid potential conflict will open up to a listening ear.
A recent study in the International Journal of Education Social Studies and Management shows how a teacher’s interpersonal communication style directly impacts student behavior. When a teacher shows appreciation to the student sharing a perspective, the student responds with more enthusiasm to learn. When students see that I am invested in their well-being, they are more likely to share what they are actually thinking and feeling. And I get an extra thrill when I see a performer who would risk an extra moment of silence to completely connect with the audience in the moment, rather than safely execute a rhythm to avoid reproach.
2. Ask questions. Approach conversations as multilayered and open-ended. For instance, you might ask, “I noticed that he frowned when you mentioned his mother. Did you also notice it?” Situations, like music, have many elements such as main theme, harmonic tone, pacing, dynamic contour, etc.
By engaging through multiple dimensions, we can loosen up people’s grip on the idea that any single view is a complete reality and open them up to wonder, “Why? Why not? What if?” Reaching a mutual understanding that we are all fallible results in more willingness to listen and not judge.
3. Connect the dots between personal morals and systemic issues.Moral reframing is using personal morals to open up a conversation about a larger issue a person may ordinarily be ideologically or politically opposed to. Regardless of a political party’s stance on universal health care, we can agree that having healthy workers who are not devastated by unexpected health care bills is essential to a stable economy.
A pretty chord by itself isn’t meaningful until it finds a place in a string of chords to create a harmonic progression. In life, too, we need a mindset to connect personal values with current issues, and individual needs with collective ones.
4. Observe and adapt. If political issues are too triggering, we can find other points of engagement. If we can’t directly talk about candidates, we can sidestep to related issues like how to get young voters involved and how to make voting easier.
To be sure, this high quality of intentional engagement is not easy and we will do it imperfectly. I am among the busy people who failed to notice right-wing radio hosts sowing the seeds of distrust with no oversight. I am among the intimidated people who didn’t fight back when progressive friends condescendingly condemned belief in the divine as a mental crutch. But I am still in the fight for a better future.
Whatever the election outcome, our underlying problem of disconnection will remain. Until we reach a healthy tipping point back into discourse, there will always be another threat waiting in the wings to hijack the country. Let’s resist these forces of destruction by evolving our collective listening to find cohesion, connection and creativity, just as we do when we listen to beautiful music.
Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework," has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
It is useful to think about the presidential election with a framework that emphasizes the old tension between isolationism and interventionism.
In many ways, the Republicans represent the isolationist camp, and the Democrats represent the interventionist camp. Of course, the exact words that are used to label the camps will not be satisfactory to everyone: right vs. left, libertarian vs. progressive, individualist vs. communitarian. Yet the old isolationist/interventionist theme has divided the nation for nearly 250 years.
Since its founding, America has struggled with the desire among some to be isolated from the rest of the world and the desire among others to be integrated with the rest of the world. We were, in the early years of the republic, quite isolated from the rest of the world by virtue of our geographic location. The colonists left the Old World to get away from it and were determined, and the revolutionaries among them wanted to create a new kind of country.
Both world wars brought into sharp focus our pull toward isolationism because the public did not want to be engaged in European conflicts. We entered World War I in 1917 and World War II in late 1941, and in each case our presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, had to work for years to prepare Congress and the people themselves for U.S. involvement in overseas wars.
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Our tension between isolationism and intervening to make the world safe for democracy is quite evident today, since we struggle over what America should do regarding Russia and Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinians, Iran, China, North Korea and NATO.
A second tension is between conservative versions of capitalism — which favor free markets, modest forms of regulation and minimum forms of redistribution of wealth and income — and versions of a mixed economy and social democracy that rely on major forms of government intervention into the private sector.
Progressives and liberals in the United States, ranging from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass. and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), stand for a strong interventionist government regarding both domestic and foreign policy. Conservative politicians ranging from former President Donald Trump to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) favor an America that, though it should defend countries like Israel, should not get too involved in the affairs of most countries and should be minimally interventionist in economic policy as well.
Government, for the conservatives and Trumpians, is not designed to implement major economic or social programs. It is, however, interventionist when it comes to protecting individuals from intrusions by the government, notably regulation of guns and programs that would, in their view, violate the basic gender or sexual identity of a person, especially young people. At its most extreme, some MAGA supporters support a strongman leader who would psychologically and physically force opponents to conform.
The battle between isolationism and interventionism is confusing to say the least. While conservatives generally are in favor of less intervention in the economy when it comes to providing equal opportunity for all, they tend to be interventionist when it comes to various social issues, including their belief that the government should intervene in women’s reproductive rights.
The overall tension typically relies on two different models of citizenship. The isolationist camp favors a view of persons as independent from each other with capacities to be self-determining beings. The interventionist camp favors a view of persons as fundamentally social beings, who, though they are capable of being self-determining, must rely on a strong interventionist federal government for the means — ranging from food and housing to information technology and health care — to realize their potential.
The debate will certainly not be solved soon and certainly will continue well beyond this election. It would be helpful if the media brought this historic tension to the fore. Hitting the public, especially in debates, with policy contrasts one after another is useful but also exhausting for citizens. The battle needs to be elevated to a more illuminating level.
However, there is one component of the isolation-vs.-intervention theme that is not debatable: No one should intervene in the rule of law or free and fair elections. Any candidate who suggests otherwise imperils our democratic republic and should not be trusted with our sacred vote.
We all should be partisan about only one thing: democracy.
Wen is a physician who teaches asylum medicine, trauma and collective healing. She is a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project in partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital.
By calling Haitian migrants with temporary protection status “illegal,” vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is spreading a more subtle and consequential lie than former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous accusations of migrants eating pets.
Our opaque migration pathways are ripe for misinformation that can fuel racist and xenophobic policies. In contrast, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance’s opponent, has been a leader in progressive policies on migration such as advocacy for a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” and allowing all Minnesotans to obtain driver’s licenses regardless of documentation status.
Humane policies on migration — particularly for those fleeing forced displacement such as persecution, war and violence — are an acknowledgement that we are all humans bound by a desire to be safe and to protect our families, and that none of us are immune to political and environmental instability.
As of May, 120 million people had been forcibly displaced, according to the UN Refugee Agency. That’s equivalent to more than one-third of the U..S population or to the population of Japan. And it double from just a decade ago. This includes refugees — people granted this specific legal status before arriving in the host country based on five protected grounds of persecution (race, religion, nationality, political opinion and membership in a particular social group); asylum seekers, who are applying for this protection; and others who fit into a patchwork of programs that vary by country and geopolitics of the time. One example of this is temporary protection status many Haitian migrants have in the United States, which since its creation by Congress in 1990 allows people coming from certain countries deemed to have unsafe conditions such as war or natural disaster to temporarily live and work in the U.S.
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I am an internal medicine physician; one of the most meaningful uses of my license is volunteering as a forensic evaluator for asylum applicants. I was trained to objectively document key parts of people’s reported history of traumas and signs and symptoms of the sequelae, psychological and/or physical, to assist the asylum officer or immigration judge to make their legal determination of asylum. Studies have shown that asylum seekers who had a forensic medical evaluation were twice as likely to be granted asylum than the national average (81 percent vs. 42 percent).
Seeking asylum, besides being an internationally recognized human right under international agreements of the United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol, is codified in U.S. law. This fundamental human right should not be politicized further. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages our immigration and asylum processes, is vulnerable and constantly under the threat of attack and defunding for political reasons. As president, Trump slashed the numbers of refugees allowed by 80 percent, and through his closed-door policies crippled the funding mechanisms for USCIS. This, despite the fact that in the past 15 years, refugees and asylees contributed a net $123 billion profit to federal, state and local governments.
I initially became interested in asylum medicine because as a physician who cares for many migrants and displaced people, I witnessed the intense stress of uncertain migration status on my patients and the toll it takes on their health. One of my middle-aged patient’s chronic abdominal pain flares during his immigration decisions as it may be more bad news about separation from his wife and 10-year-old daughter. Another young woman with depression and insomnia has difficulty following up for her severe asthma as she tiptoes around her abusive partner because her and her children’s immigration status depends on him.
This “violence of uncertainty” is particularly harmful for people seeking asylum, refugees and other migrants who suffer from traumas of violence and persecution. Studies from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have shown that longer wait times for asylum applicants are associated with worse physical and emotional health, independent of prior exposure to trauma and violence.
Conducting forensic evaluations for people applying for asylum and other protected statuses is one way to leverage my existing skills and privilege as a clinician to help other asylum applicants move through a byzantine, opaque, understaffed and underfunded system.
To be sure, the asylum process is far from perfect and focuses on an individual’s experience with being personally targeted by persecution on grounds that the U.S. sociopolitical system prioritizes. It does not address other key types of forced displacement such as the climate crisis — already pressing humanitarian disasters bound to become more catastrophic — or even being displaced by war and violence. Furthermore, we continue to detain and criminalize those who are deemed to have entered the U.S. illegally, even if they did so to seek asylum. That’s why we need updated, reformed, humane migration policies to reflect current drivers of migration.
Yet, I continue to participate in this flawed asylum system, much like I continue to go to work in a broken and inequitable health care system with the hopes of making it better. I keep returning because this work reminds me of why I became a physician in the first place: It’s a way to connect with common humanity. More than anything, I am struck by how similar stories are across the world, how fundamentally we are united by a desire for safety and belonging. In nearly every forensic interview, the client shares with me a deep desire to put their worst traumas in the past and plan for the future. They want to let go of the breath they’ve been holding for years, maybe decades — something they cannot do with uncertain status.
Healing from trauma takes place individually, interpersonally and societally. We can start where we are: Look around you, and in your own family history — when were your ancestors displaced and desperate for safety? How do you wish they were treated, and what skills do you have to help others now? Honor their memories by speaking out and voting for compassion and unity. Future generations are watching.
